Ken stared after him for seconds after he had disappeared. Feth had always been taciturn, but he had seemed friendly enough. Now it almost seemed as though he were angry at Ken’s presence.
With a sigh, the pro tem detective turned back up the ramp. It wouldn’t hurt to knock at the door, anyway. The only reason he hadn’t the first time was probably a subconscious hope that he would find Drai somewhere else, and feel free to investigate. Since his common sense told him he couldn’t investigate anyway, he knocked.
It was just as well he hadn’t made any amateur efforts at lock-picking, he decided as the door opened. Drai was there, apparently waiting for him. His face bore no recognizable expression; either whatever bothered Feth had not affected him, or he was a much better actor than the mechanic. Ken, feeling he knew Feth, inclined to the former view.
“I’m afraid I’m not convinced of the usability of any Sarrian soil,” Drai opened the conversation. “I agree that most of the substances present in it, as far as I know, could also be present at Planet Three’s temperature; but I’m not so sure the reverse is true. Mightn’t there be substances that would be solid or liquid at that temperature and gaseous at ours, so that they would be missing from any we brought from home?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Ken admitted. “The fact that I can’t think of any such substances doesn’t mean they don’t exist, either. I can skim through the handbook and see if there are any inorganic compounds that would behave that way, but even that might miss some — and if their life is at all analogous to ours, there are probably a couple of million organic compounds — for which we don’t have any catalogue. No, blast it, I guess you’re right; we’ll have to take the stuff from the planet itself.” He lapsed into silent thought, from which Drai finally aroused him.
“Do you really think you’re going to be able to get to the surface of that world?”
“I still can’t see why we shouldn’t,” replied Ken. “It seems to me that people have visited worse ones before, bad as that is. Feth is pessimistic about it, though, and I suppose he has more practical knowledge of the problem than I. We can make more definite plans in that direction when the suit comes back, which shouldn’t be long now. According to the instruments it started back a couple of hours ago.”
“That means nearly three days before you’re sure. There must be something else — say! You claim it’s the presence of a conducting atmosphere that makes the heat loss on Planet Three so great, don’t you?”
“Sure. You know as well as I that you can go out in an ordinary space suit light years from the nearest sun; radiation loss is easy to replace. Why?”
“I just thought — there are other planets in this system. If we could find an airless one roughly the same temperature as Three, we might get soil from that.”